WinterSpringSummer

Friday morning, the snowy gray skies — the omen of yet another homebound day in so many weeks — inspired me to bake.  And such wintry weather made me immediately crave something pumkiny. Okay, I crave pumpkin treats all year round, but I think they are especially appropriate any time from say mid-September to late-February/early-March.

I’ve had this recipe for Iced Pumpkin Cookies for years. Years. I always use extra spices & add chocolate chips. I almost never bother with the icing. I really should just type up my own recipe.

This time, I really monkeyed around with it. I substituted in a 1/2 cup of wheat flour and a 1/2 cup of Splenda to accommodate my diet, and I used Ener-G egg replacer so the Boy could also enjoy a cookie. This last substitution was especially important since was the very first thing he’s “helped” me bake — and by this I mean he wore his own apron for all of 5 seconds, played with funnels and spoons, watched stuff churn in the stand mixer, and enjoyed licking batter from my fingers.

Nothing better than the scent of two dozen pumpkin cookies filling the house

So, here’s the final recipe:

2 c. all-purpose flour
1/2 c. wheat flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. cloves
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 c. butter (softened)
1 c. sugar
1/2 c. Splenda
1 c. canned pumpkin
1-1/2 tsp. Ener-G egg replacer (prepped according to package directions)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 c. chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

• In a medium-sized bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients (flour thru salt on the list above)
• In another bowl, cream together the butter, sugar & Splenda
• Add the pumpkin, egg replacer (stirred into 2 tbsp water, as per package directions), and vanilla to butter/sugar mixture. Blend until creamy and smooth.
• Add dry ingredients and mix until evenly blended.
• Finally, add chocolate chips and stir gently by hand until evenly distributed.
• Drop tablespoons full onto prepared baking sheets (I lined with parchment paper, but you could also spray with cooking spray). Bake for 15-20 minutes.

Makes 24 cookies.

These cookies came out perfectly. With no noticeable difference from previous versions made with full sugar and eggs. They are always fluffy and a bit cakey, which I think comes from the pumpkin. They clock in at 136 calories per cookie… which isn’t great, but isn’t bad when you consider they are pretty sizable and filling. The Little Mister ate them for lunch on Friday. And the Boy had them for snack AND dessert – definite winners!

Until recently, I severely undervalued the Rice Krispy Treat. Since it doesn’t require much time or technical prowess, I didn’t give it much thought. But in a quick pinch the classic Treat is an easy win. Actually, not long ago, I made two batches for a whole mess of house guests and found that I didn’t have to offer anyone breakfast.

But unlike a regular cookie, brownie, or bar, I never really considered the creative possibilities of the Rice Krispy Treat. I have the folks at Special K, makers of the Chocolatey Pretzel bar. I bought these little yummies with a coupon and fell instantly in love. At the same time, I thought to myself, “Hey, I can do this!” And I did. Don’t they look yummy!

Tried & true treat -- part salty, part sweet

Here’s what I used… Dare I even call it a recipe?

3 tbsp unsalted butter
4 cups mini marshmallows
5 cups Rice Krispies
1 cup pretzel sticks, broken into 1/2″ bits
1/2 cup chocolate chips1. Combine Rice Krispies and pretzel bits. Stir together so pretzels are distributed evenly within the Krispies.

2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan.

3. Add the marshmallows & stir to coat with melted butter.

4. Stir marshmallow until fully melted.

5. Once marshmallow is fully melted, add Krispy/pretzel mix and stir to coat with marshmallow.

6. When Krispy/pretzels are mostly coated, add chips and stir to incorporate. Many of the chips will likely melt & this is fine. (If you’d rather they not melt, you might want to try dropping them in when you spread the mixture into your casserole dish.)

7. Spread mixture in a 13×9 casserole dish. Use waxed paper to press even. Let cool. Cut into 12 squares.

Sure, my treats had twice the calories of the Special K variety — but about 180 calories per bar isn’t too shabby as far as tasty bits go. These bars were also pretty substantial and filling. In the next go ’round, I’ll probably trade out another 1/2 cup of Krispies for an extra 1/2 cup of pretzels, but otherwise these were pretty much perfect.

I also suspect that these treats would be great to make with kids, though at 1-1/2 my little one is still too little to really be much help. But for those with slightly older tots (I suspect even kids as young as 2-1/2 or 3) this is pretty engaging for such a simple treat. There’s no hot oven to bother with. You can set the kiddos to breaking up the pretzels while you melt the butter & marshmallows. And once the treats are ready for the pan, their little hands will love the feel of the treats under the wax paper. Yay!

argh!

so, i just realized how painfully out of date i was (am?): apparently, the site that was hosting my audio files went belly up a year ago! whoops! and apparently they only notified the paying customers – not the folks that were hosting audio for free (because, you know, sending a mass email is just that difficult).

anyway, i’m trying to find a good site for hosting my audio and streaming it here, for free. there doesn’t seem to be a YouTube equivalent for audio… or am I missing something? WTF?

i found a service that looks pretty good… only their player doesn’t seem to be embedding properly. Not for me, anyway (or for the 12 other people that logged the same problem in the past day). I’m waiting for some feedback. But in the meantime, you can listen to the tracks by clicking on the titles under the dysfunctional players, or by going directly to my page on SoundCloud.

And if anyone knows of a reliable audio hosting/streaming service, let me know. Please.

UPDATE: Looks like all my players are working now. Yippey!

SoundCloud’s whole website was just down for about 30 mins… not sure how often that happens or how flukey the site/service really is. But for now, play away!

Nothing makes you want to bake like being snowed in. Snow drifts pushing up into the house on all sides, wind blowing clumps of snow from the tree branches into the windows, and not even the mail delivery to make you feel connected to the outside world. (Yep, that’s right, they’re not even delivering mail today in the Philly area — my grandmother would be so ashamed!)

After feeling dazed for a day, not knowing what to bake, today I succumbed to a long-time craving for peach muffins. Late last summer, the Little Mister, the Boy, and I went peach picking at Linvilla Orchards. I cut and froze a few pounds of peaches (because I still haven’t gotten my act together to learn how to can) and they’ve been calling to me lately. But I’ve been cautious about baking much of anything, because since January I’ve been carefully watching what I eat in an attempt to finally shake the baby weight I’ve been hanging on to for a year and a half.

Fortunately, I found this very simple recipe for Peach Muffins in Bakin’ Without Eggs (a recipe book I tried last summer & eventually bought when we found out that the Boy hadn’t outgrown his egg allergy):

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They’re here!

This week, I debuted my first set of poetry postcards/broadsides at my reading in Elkins Park. I designed four unique cards (4×6 inches) featuring four different poems, using word art, images, and ink stamps. I’m really happy with how they came out, and people seemed to like them (they bought them!) so I was inspired to create a way for folks to view and buy them online.

If you’re so inclined, you can check them out here and on Etsy.

I hope to be making more cards with other poems in the future. Any feedback on these “first edition” cards is most welcome.

The Little Mister often wonders at my beloved bread machine. So rarely used, yet so fondly thought of. I usually crack out the bread machine about once a year, and yesterday was the day. With mountains of snow locking us in and the Little Mister’s beef stew in the crock pot, I decided to throw the flour, water, yeast, etc., in the machine and call myself a bread maker. But my infrequent bread making (if you can even really consider it that) makes me extra cautious. I basically stick to the recipes in the machine cookbook, without deviation.

Until this time. I usually prefer a whole wheat bread, but was also in the mood for something with an extra savory kick. So, I took the bread machine book’s “Parmesan-Pepper” recipe and swapped out 1/2 of the regular bread flour with whole wheat. That’s it — hardly even counts as a deviation.

But as the bread reached the ‘baking’ stage of the process, I got totally paranoid. I peered in to see how it was doing, and it seemed unusually lumpy. I know that wheat flour is generally ‘thirstier’ than regular flour, and I wondered if I ought to have added extra water or oil? It was at this point in the process that I consulted the machine’s instructions and found the helpful tip suggesting that you check in during the kneading cycles to see if your dough needs more water or flour. Ooops. I suppose I should have thought of that earlier…

Oh well. I used a wooden spoon to help fit the dough more evenly in the baking pan & let the machine do its thing. The smell was pretty amazing, so I was hopeful that even if my bread was a little dry & lumpy, it would taste darned good.

And I was pretty much right. Here it is.

Still looks pretty good, right?

The peppery cheesey flavor was more subtle than I expected, and the bread was a little wheatier than I expected (which I liked). But with bread, texture has so much to do with the flavor that the dryness and denseness of the bread definitely detracted. It was at that point that the Little Mister pointed out that bread machine bread almost always seems to be dense — at least whenever we’ve had it made by others or our selves.

A quick google search suggests I’m not the only one to have this issue. Some suggest that you need to use bread machine yeast (I was using Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast, and I suspected this could have been the culprit) and more water (which I also considered, of course). Others get more complicated, suggesting you add extra gluten. This quick list of common bread machine problems seems pretty helpful, and I expect I may find myself consulting this again if I decide to make bread again this year. Otherwise, I’ll probably just forget all about my problems and wind up eating dense, dry bread again next year — and thinking its great anyway, just because I made it myself.

So, I was just flipping through my most recent issue of Poets & Writers (a mag with which I’ve had a several years love/hate relationship), and I saw a little blurb about Madras Press. Madras is a new press that publishes stories in individually bound editions… so fiction writers don’t have to cut their stories short to fit into lit mags, or make them unnecessarily long to be a novella. They can, ostensibly, have an outlet for stories that are the length they’ve decided they should be. And readers get one story, without lots of ads or other filler. Nice. I like it.

Here’s the thing I’m feeling iffy about. Madras is a nonprofit, and the website explains that all net proceeds from books sales are donated to a charity of the author’s choosing. Now, I come to you as a woman who has spent the better part of her life trying to be of service — giving away my 8th grade field trip spending money to a homeless man in D.C., volunteering in high school, college & after, and ultimately settling into a career as a nonprofit fundraiser & manager. I am all about supporting nonprofits of all shapes and sizes. BUT, I don’t understand why the writers can’t make a little money off their writing?

Now, I don’t know what exactly Madras means by “net proceeds” — maybe they have built in some compensation to the writer — but it seems to me that writers can raise their voices and use their work to support nonprofits, without sacrificing themselves. We need to be able to leverage our art to get money from those who really have it to spare, rather than just giving up what little we might earn.

And this isn’t the first I’ve heard of this… the Poetic Arts Performance Project here in Philly that aims to “use our poetic gifts and those of artists from around the country and globe to help other charitable organizations in the Philadelphia area.” That’s commendable… and yet, I often wonder about arts organizations (which are hobbled to begin with) trying to help other organizations. Why can’t it be enough to raise up the arts, to focus on raising up the arts, and let the art have the powerful social effect that art can have. Keep what little money you might make and put it back into your own organization, so you can spread more art, whether that’s through publishing more stories that won’t find a home any other way, or putting on kick ass readings & educational events. I wonder… do these organizations think that they need to bribe potential patrons with the promise of a tax write off? Do they think it somehow makes it okay to pay for art by not really paying for art by giving to something “more worthy”?  Honestly, I suspect these organizations recognize that they aren’t going to get rich off their books and events, and they altruistically believe that what little they raise can make a difference to another struggling organization. And they may be right.

But I’m not convinced… I’m not sure that doing this doesn’t just reinforce the idea of writing as folly, hobby, something readers can & should get for free… unless its by someone a major publishing house has told them they should pay for.  I know that no one goes into writing for money… but why must writers always be hobbyists, why must we exhaust ourselves at full-time jobs so that we can pay the bills, so that we can live, so that we can write. Why can’t we try to get a least a little compensation for all the hours, heartache, tears, and papercuts we endure as artists.

Everyone else does it. I know its hard for some of us to understand that people who are scientists, engineers, and technologists are really passionate artists in the work they do. Only they make medicines and machines, and they don’t give them away for free just because they loved the process of creating and because they are so impressed with what they made. Hells no. If that was the case, everyone would have a car, a computer, and an iPod.

Maybe that’s over-simplified. And maybe not. All I know is when I buy a book or go to an event, when I’m really impressed by a writer, I feel great knowing that writer is going to get a little compensation for a job well done. A writer who needs that money to keep doing the best damn job she can. Making art. Putting it out there, in people’s faces, saying I am worth something. I am valuable. Listen to me.

Phew! I knew this blog was badly out of date… every week I think of new things I want to blog about- things I’m baking, reading, listening to, etc.  And then… well…

But tonight I had a great reading at the Elkins Park Free Library and a few people, including a very generous spirit named Ruth, asked about my website – and so it seems its time to get some motivation back.

As far as readings go, this one was pretty awesome. 30 whole minutes! Enough to present a variety of my work & not feel like I’d overstayed my welcome. And the room was packed, at least 20-30 people. But only about 1/2 of the audience read in the open mic, which means the rest of the folks were there to listen & enjoy poetry. As someone who hosts a monthly reading, I’m still amazed & delighted by those crowds. But then again, those that did read in the open mic were talented and genuine with their art. What’s more, I sold 10 of my brand-spankin’-new poetry postcards (more info & pictures to come).

Many thanks to everyone who was there! It’s always an honor to get invited to read. Tonight was an honor and a pleasure. Plus, I serendipitously discovered a great little reading venue just 10 minutes from my house. Bonus!

What do you get when you’ve got PMS, a full bag of leftover rolled oats, and a bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips?  Why Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies, of course!

Chocolatey Oaty Goodness

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A few weeks ago the Little Mister had a requested oatmeal cookies:  “..the kind with carrots in them.  Have you ever had those?”

Well, no, in fact I hadn’t.  But I was intrigued.

I started by checking out the recipes for oatmeal cookies in Baking Illustrated, How to Cook Everything, and The Joy of Cooking.  No carrots anywhere.  So, I searched the trusty internet and found several Carrot Raisin Oatmeal or Oatmeal Raisin Carrot or Oatmeal Carrot Raisin, etc. etc. — all of them just different enough, none seeming as fundamentally sound as the BI version (there’s just something about all their testing and explanation that wins me over). So, I decided to make their cookie, with the tiniest substitution — instead of 1-1/2 c. of raisins, I added a 1/2 c. each of raisins, shredded carrots, and chopped walnuts.

These cookies are knobbly & yummy!

The result is a hearty but balanced oatmeal cookie.  Although I normally like my baked goodies pretty bare bones, these cookies felt just right.  I actually think splitting the large helping of raisins into smaller helpings of the three different ingredients insured that no one flavor would overwhelm the cookie or outshine the oats.  I also really like the BI instruction to add nutmeg, rather than cinnamon.  It is, as they suggest, a much more subtle spice than I’ve come to expect from oatmeal cookies.

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